Dr. Earl Babbie, “Situation Critical: Must Address Population
Growth.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Guest Writer, 7-9-15), p. 7B.“Two recent simultaneous news
stories highlight perhaps the most serious problem we face in the world
today: the denial of population as the chief cause or amplifier of the many
problems that are spoken of more often.”
[Babbie, Campbell professor emeritus at Chapman Univ. in Orange, CA,
lives in Hot Springs Village. I located
Dr. Babbie by phone and invited him to visit us, which I hope will happen
before the end of the year. I learned he
had considerable experience working with family planning organizations in the
US. –Dick]

Due
to the decades-long, world-wide popularity of his textbooks in social research, Dr.Earl
Babbie is one of the most
famous living sociologists today. He holds ...

BUSINESS AS USUAL

CORPORATIONS, UNIVERSITIES, AND THE CHALLENGE
OF FEEDING THE WORLD. Brian Fanney, “UA
Students Urged to Take Up Challenge of Feeding the World.” Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette (April 1, 2015).
Reviewed by Dick Bennett.

The opening sentence reveals the chicanery,
unexamined assumptions, indifference to the poor, and the narrow vision of the
individual being interviewed in the report.
“Feeding a growing global middle class will stress the world’s
resources, but it presents a major opportunity for food companies.” According to Mr. Fanney, this is the
“concept Patricia Woertz, chairman of the board of directors of Archer Daniels Midland Co, focused on
during the fourth Dale and Betty Bumpers Distinguished Lecture Series at the
University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.”
True oh yes for the industries.
But think: The world adds
another billion people every 12 years, and most of those will be poor, and many
of them prolific, unless a massive, global program of universal access to
voluntary contraception has been implemented, without which most will continue
to barely eke out a living with no hope of reaching the middle class. Also, such population growth will do more
than merely “stress” the food supply, but will stress it enormously. And the stress will be felt by the poor, who
cannot pay for the seed and equipment offered by Archer, Daniels, Midland. Furthermore, feeding all of the people of
the world, which should be our justice goal, is much more of a problem than can
be solved by profit-opportunity oriented corporate CEOs and shareholders, but
will require the concerted care of all the agencies of affirmative governments
around the world, including significant restraint on population growth. Yes?

“’To serve overall demand,’” Ms Woertz continues,
“’the world will need to have produced enough food in the next 40 years as in
the last 10,000.’” And how is that to
be accomplished? By world cooperation,
by a global FDR New Deal plus WWII and Apollo mobilizations? With nine billion and possibly even eleven or
twelve billion people rushing toward us (as Ms. Woertz acknowledges), one could
expect the United Nations would be called upon.
Oh no. “’In years to come,
virtually every company will need to become more productive.’” “More productive”? How much more does her comparative
promise? More than what? When were the people living on a dollar day
ever provided enough by “companies” designed for private profit not public
benefit? But she is really not talking
about world demand, but about people who can afford to purchase the food
ingredients, animal feeds, biofuels, and other products provided by the ADM of
the world.

Ms. Woertz loves the vague comparative
form (Ipana toothpaste will make your teeth whiter). “’As the world’s population eventually
swells to more than 9 billion, Archer Daniels Midland is investing in more
storage and transportation to meet the growing demand for food.’” How much more will be needed? And is she claiming ADM will do it without
public subsidy? And what does she mean
by “meet.” She wishes us to think she
means the fifth meaning in my dictionary of “deal with, handle, satisfy,
fulfill, take care of.” But we know she
actually means the first meaning, “encounter, come across, stumble on,” or the
second, “meet with, rendezvous with” (death!) the additional billion people by
2027, because, as Fanney reports her saying, “The world has only so much water
and land suitable for crop production.”

Sadly for Dale and Betty Bumpers, two of
Arkansas’ greatest citizens of and for the world, who believed in affirmative
government on behalf of the well-being of all, particularly of children, the
Dean of Dale Bumpers College of Agriculture, Food and Life Science, repeated
Ms. Woertz’s message, as reported by Mr. Fanney: “the college is preparing students for a
world where they have to meet the challenges posed by a growing
population.” He is even more alarmingly
specific: “The college takes suggestions
from companies about problems in the agricultural industry and has
multidisciplinary teams of students work to solve them.” Here, all becomes clear in this visit to the
UofA by the chairman of the board of directors of ADM. The College of Agriculture is a research
servant of the food corporations. It
gets worse (see the comparison): “’It’s like a senior thesis, except it’s done
as a group,’ Vayda said,” adding, ‘so the faculty are more like
advisers.’” Who comes first? Who’s on first?

Today, for the first time
in history, there are 7 billion people on Earth.

This scary milestone for
the globe -- falling on Halloween, of all days -- means greater threats to the
animals, plants and wildlands we're all working hard to save.

Our planet is in the midst
of its sixth mass extinction crisis, with plants and animals going extinct at
100 to 1,000 times the normal rate. And this one's being driven by us --
people.

The population crisis is
why the Center for Biological Diversity has broken new ground over the past two
years, creating our human overpopulation and endangered species campaign and
sparking nationwide conversations about the impacts of skyrocketing population
with our award-winning Endangered Species Condoms.

In fact, The New York
Times today credited the Center for "breaking the taboo by directly tying
population growth to environmental problems." Other groups, the Times
said, "have dodged the subject" for decades.

The momentum had been
building as today's milestone approached; we launched a new, national 7 Billion
and Counting campaign this month that raised public awareness and distributed
100,000 free Endangered Species Condoms in all 50 states.

On Friday, we also
released a major new report highlighting the top 10 U.S. species that are
threatened by habitat loss, water loss and other direct effects of
overpopulation. They include the Florida panther, polar bear, San Joaquin kit
fox and Lange's metalmark butterfly.

With the world's attention
turned to the 7 billionth person, being born today, we must press on in this
ambitious and necessary public-education campaign.

In my lifetime alone, the
world's human population has doubled. By 2050, another 4 billion people are
expected to be added. As the human population grows and rich countries continue
to consume resources at voracious rates, we are crowding out, poisoning,
killing and consuming Earth's species into extinction.

The Center's the only
national environmental group with a full-time campaign focusing solely on human
overpopulation and the effect it's having on imperiled species.

The cost of doing nothing
-- of ignoring the population explosion -- is frightening to contemplate. Think
what it would be like if polar bears, panthers and thousands of other species
were crowded off our planet and into oblivion forever.

Today, as you think about
the impact of the world's population hitting 7 billion people, I hope you'll
commit to contact your representatives, write letters to the editor, take
action online and support this critical work to address the impacts of human overpopulation.

You can use our
Take-Action Toolbox to start making change today and subscribe to the Center's
Pop X e-newsletter to get the latest population news.

For a livable world,

Kierán Suckling

Executive Director

Center for Biological Diversity

P.S. You can read today's story in The New York Times here and learn more
about how we're leading the environmental movement on this issue and urging
action. Stay tuned on how you can help and keep speaking up.

POPULATION, WATER, FOOD

“Water, Water, Nowhere.”
By Theo Anderson. In These Times (August
2013). As population increases the
world’s water supplies decrease, and it is unclear where the needed water will
come from. Apparently no nation has a
national conservation policy. In the US,
states are beginning to wage legal battles over contested water, and similar
conflicts are increasing around the world.
Helpfully, the UN has declared 2013 “the international year of water
cooperation” and September the “world water week” to stimulate planning. The article concludes with a hopeful account
of San Antonio’s successful water conservation program. –Dick

Last year, 17.2 million
households in the United States were food insecure, the highest level on
record, as the Great Recession continued to wreak havoc on families across the
country. Of those 17.2 million households, 3.9 million included children. On
Thanksgiving weekend, here’s a look at hunger in America, as millions of
Americans struggle to get enough to eat in the wake of the economic crisis.»

Ian Angus is editor of Climate and
Capitalism, an online journal focusing on ... "As the global population
passes the seven billion mark, this book is a timely ...

According to the United
Nations, world population will reach the 7 billion mark on Monday. IAN ANGUS,
ecosocialism at gmail.com Angus is the co-author of the recent book Too Many People?: Population, Immigration,
and the Environmental Crisis. He has just published the piece “Is the
Environmental Crisis Caused by the 7 Billion or the 1%?” [...]

The United Nations Population Fund's 2013 State of the World Population
report says governments and private groups must do a better job of reaching
girls younger than 15 to prevent child pregnancies. UNFPA says that 2 million girls
younger than 15 in developing nations give birth each year. "This age
group is not being targeted and focused on to prevent pregnancy before it
happens," says UNFPA's Dr. Laura Laski.

CATHLEEN MILLER, CHAMPION OF CHOICE: The Life and
Legacy of Women’s Advocate Nafis Sadik.
U of Nebraska P, 2013

A dense biography of Dr. Nafis Sadik, who changed the world for
women through her work on population control.

Cathleen Miller (Creative
Writing/San Jose State Univ.; Desert
Flower: The Extraordinary Journey of a Desert Nomad, 1998, etc.) researched
Sadik for 10 years to give us this biographical view of the former undersecretary-general and executive director of
the U.N. Population Fund. The book
follows the improbable path of the Pakistani Sadik through partition, medical
school, her early work in local population control and her efforts for the U.N.
Population Fund, which she directed for 13 years. Sadik’s family “celebrated
her femininity, valued her wishes, gave her the same educational opportunities
as her brothers, then encouraged her career and independence.” She worked
passionately against genital mutilation, obstetric fistula and childhood
marriage. Through Sadik’s tenure at the U.N., the organization was “able to
bring respectability to the concept of family planning.” She helped set the
tone for controlling population growth by empowering women through education
and ensuring basic human rights. The apex of Sadik’s career was the U.N.’s 1994
International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo. She
outmaneuvered even the Vatican to support reproductive choice for women,
brokering consensus for a 20-year plan to address world population and
development. Miller intersperses each chapter about Sadik with vignettes of
women she met while researching this book. These personal stories introduce us
to victims of abuse, persecution, genital mutilation, prostitution and gang
rape. Pub Date: March 1st, 2013 : 524pp

The International Planned Parenthood
Federation

• Home

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The International Planned
Parenthood Federation

IPPF works in 172
countries to empower the most vulnerable women, men and young people to access
life-saving services and programmes, and to live with dignity.

Supported by millions of
volunteers and 30,000 staff, IPPF Member Associations provide sexual and
reproductive health information, education and services through 65,000 service
points. Those services include family planning, abortion, maternal and child
health, and STI and HIV treatment, prevention and care.

Every year, our Member
Associations help millions of poor and vulnerable people avoid unsafe
childbirth, unsafe sex, unsafe abortion, STI-related illnesses and HIV-related
stigma and discrimination. And together, we fight for local, national and
global policies which recognize a fundamental human right - the right to sexual
and reproductive health.

This map shows Total
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Population Connection is a
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stop what they believe is an unsustainable rate of

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ARGUMENTS FOR CHOICE

POPULATION AND CLIMATE CHANGE : See: OMNI
population and climate change.doc, OMNI World Population Day.doc

ART ON ABORTION

Dear Patricia - I like your views on being
green, but I strongly disagree with you about abortion as expressed below in
"A free webcast about ending abortion." National and international studies show that
the anti-abortion movement's attempts to outlaw abortion have only resulted in
more abortions. Abortion, along with
birth control and sex education, needs to be legal, safe, and easy to
obtain. Nations with easy access to
abortion have less abortions per capita.
The ironically-named "pro-life" movement has only one real
purpose: To punish women. Please take a look at my recent NWA Times
column about this issue:
http://physics.uark.edu/hobson/NWAT/10.06.06.html.

In order to fully understand
any polling data, we have to understand who the numbers are about. Last week,
Gallup released polling data that showed a drop in support for legal abortion
among young adults ages 18 to 29. Although young people still show the highest
level of support for abortion across the generations, this drop is concerning.
However, we must look past the numbers to uncover why young people are
expressing lower levels of support for abortion and how we might better engage
them in the future.

Today’s young people were
the unfortunate beneficiaries of eight years of funding and support for
abstinence-only education. As a result, those in their late teens and twenties
experience the highest rates of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and
unintended pregnancies. But the detrimental impact extends well beyond STIs and
pregnancies.

For the most part,
abstinence-only education either does not make mention about abortion rights
and services or casts these rights and services in a bad light. And so, young
people have not received accurate information they need to make informed
decisions about their own lives or create informed opinions about matters of
reproductive justice.

One of Choice USA’s young
activists from Kentucky put it best: “I feel that I was short-changed in sex
education because I was taught abstinence-only-until-marriage and that just
doesn’t apply to everyone.”

Abstinence-only education
is not solely responsible for the drop in support for legal abortion among
young adults. As we know, young people receive their information both in and
out of school. Unfortunately, out of school, the silence on, discomfort with
and denigration of abortion has been repeated in a wide variety of venues.

Perhaps the most puzzling
aspect of this polling data is that, while the data indicate changes in
attitudes, young adults are nonetheless having the vast majority of abortions.
A recent Guttmacher study found that women in their twenties account for 58
percent of all abortions in the United States.

Without doubt, and as we
know when it comes to the stigma attached to abortion rights, there is a great
disconnect between what young people are doing and what young people are
saying.

We must overcome the
stigma attached to abortion in order to engage all people, and most especially
young people. We need to craft messages and provide information that change the
hearts and minds of people and that lift up the human aspects of the abortion
debate. It isn’t just about changing attitudes towards abortion, we must change
how people view sex and sexuality on the whole.

Study after study has
shown that young people are very progressive and also very concerned with
“morality.” We need to take that knowledge and create spaces for young people
to receive accurate, unbiased information and wrestle with the moral dimensions
–in their various forms and complexities--of sexual and reproductive health.

In Choice USA’s work in
high schools and colleges, we often meet students who have yet to form an
opinion on abortion. They come to us and express reservations, frequently
rooted in their cultural or religious background. We try to provide these
students with spaces, free from judgment, in which they can talk about the
complexities of abortion. Some do decide they are against abortion in some or
all circumstances. More often than not, with accurate information in hand,
these young people choose to support the full range of reproductive rights.

It’s true that today’s
young people didn’t experience the tragedy of back alley abortions. Young people can respect, but not fully
comprehend, the struggles that led to the Roe decision. And young people
weren’t there during the founding moments of today’s pro-choice movement.

Yet while young adults
didn’t necessarily experience these things directly, they have experienced the
lack of affordable options for abortion services. Young people know the impact
of heinous parental notification and 24-hour waiting period laws. Above all,
young people feel the stigma that exists around having abortions and supporting
abortion rights.

In a recent interview
about the contraceptive pill, Gloria Steinem was asked if she thought young
people took the Pill for granted. She simply replied, “I hope so.” Hopefully,
one day soon, young people will be able to take a woman’s right to choose for
granted. That day has not yet arrived. But only then will we know our work was
not done in vain.

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. -- So what's the biggest time-bomb for Obama, America,
capitalism, the world? No, not global warming. Not poverty. Not even peak oil.
What is the absolute biggest, one like the trigger mechanism on a nuclear bomb,
one that'll throw a wrench in global economic growth, ending capitalism, even
destroying modern civilization?

The one that -- if not
solved soon -- renders all efforts to solve all the other problems in the
world, irrelevant, futile and virtually impossible? . . . .

News flash: the
"Billionaires Club" knows: Bill Gates called billionaire
philanthropists to a super-secret meeting in Manhattan last May. Included:
Buffett, Rockefeller, Soros, Bloomberg, Turner, Oprah and others meeting at the
"home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize biochemist and president of
the private Rockefeller University, in Manhattan," reports John Harlow in
the London TimesOnline. During an afternoon session each was "given 15
minutes to present their favorite cause. Over dinner they discussed how they
might settle on an 'umbrella cause' that could harness their interests."

The world's biggest
time-bomb? Overpopulation, say the billionaires.

And yet, global
governments with their $50 trillion GDP, aren't even trying to solve the
world's overpopulation problem. G-20 leaders ignore it. So by 2050 the Earth's
population will explode by almost 50%, from 6.6 billion today to 9.3 billion
says the United Nations.

And what about those
billionaires and their billions? Can they stop the trend? Sadly no. Only a
major crisis, a global catastrophe, a collapse beyond anything prior in world
history will do it. Here's why:

Civilizations collapse
fast, crises trigger, leaders clueless

"One of the
disturbing facts of history is that so many civilizations collapse," warns Jared Diamond, an
environmental biologist, Pulitzer prize winner and author of Collapse:
How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Many "civilizations share
a sharp curve of decline. Indeed, a society's demise may begin only a decade or
two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power."

. . . .

Call it "WWIII: The
Population Wars." A few years ago Fortune analyzed a classified Pentagon report predicting that "climate could change radically and
fast. That would be the mother of all national security issues" Population unrest would then create
"massive droughts, turning farmland into dust bowls and forests to
ashes." And "by 2020 there
is little doubt that something drastic is happening ... an old pattern could
emerge; warfare defining human life." War will be the end-game: For capitalism,
civilization, earth?

Diamond's 12-part equation is very simple, fits perfectly with a global warfare
scenario: "More people require more food, space, water, energy, and other
resources ... There is a long built-in momentum to human population growth
called the 'demographic bulge' with a disproportionate number of children and
young reproductive-age people." And if the "bulge" stops for any
reason, game over. Economic "growth" ends, killing capitalism.

So look closely: Diamond's equation has 12 time-bombs. But
note, the first two are the biggest triggers in the formula. The other 10
are derivative variables.

1. Overpopulation Multiplier

According to TimesOnline:
A few months before the billionaires meeting Gates noted: "Official [U.N.]
projections say the world's population will peak at 9.3 billion [up from 6.6
billion today] but with charitable initiatives, such as better reproductive health
care, we think we can cap that at 8.3 billion." Still, that's 23% more
than today's 6.6 billion.

Can it be stopped? In a recent special issue of Scientific
American, population was called "the most overlooked and essential
strategy for achieving long-term balance with the environment." Why?
Population's the new "third-rail" for politicians. So they ignore it.

Yet, if all nations
consumed resources at the same rate as America, we'd need six Earths to
survive. Unfortunately that scenario is unstoppable. Because by 2050, while
America's population grows from 300 million to a mere 400 million, the rest of
the world will explode from 6.3 billion to 8.9 billion, with over 1.4 billion
each in China and India.

2. Population Impact Multiplier

Diamond warns: "There
are 'optimists' who argue that the world could support double its human
population." But he adds, they "consider only the increase in human
numbers and not average increase in per-capita impact. But I have not heard
anyone who seriously argues that the world could support 12 times it's current
impact." And yet, that's exactly what happens with "all third-world
inhabitants adopting first-world standards."

Folks, we oversold the
American dream. Now everyone wants it. Not just 300 million Americans, but 6.3
billion people worldwide are demanding more, more, more!

"What really
counts," says Diamond, "is not the number of people alone, but their
impact on the environment," the "per-capita impact." First-world
citizens "consume 32 times more resources such as fossil fuels, and put
out 32 times more waste, than do the inhabitants of the Third World." So
the race is on: "Low impact people are becoming high-impact people"
aspiring "to first-world living standards." The American dream is now
the global dream.

Warning: The "Impact
Multiplier" will drive the global "WWIII-Population Wars"
equation even if there is zero population growth to 2050!

In Diamond's masterpiece,
"Collapse," the two key variables are what we call the
"Over-Population Multiplier" and "Population Impact
Multiplier." Now let's closely examine Diamond's other 10 variables that
are driving our "WWIII-Population Wars" equation:. . . .

Swomley, John M. “The population wars.” (148 wars since World
War II relate to population issues)(Cover Story) . The
Humanist, July 1, 1998.

Military analyst Ruth Sivard cites 148 wars
in the world since World

War II. Among these were wars in the Sudan, Somalia,
Cambodia, Georgia, Burundi, Afghanistan, Rwanda, and many others. Most

of these were what can be called
"population wars."

Since the end of the Cold War, the nature of
war has changed. No longer are we fighting other countries but, rather,
ourselves. According to the United Nations, only three of the world's
eighty-two armed conflicts in 1989 through 1992 were between countries; the
rest were within countries. They have been the result of our failure to prevent
reactionary religious forces from limiting and, at times, destroying the
opportunity of millions worldwide to receive family planning, birth control,
and legal abortion services.

In its 1997 quadrennial Defense Review, the
Pentagon warns of a pending catastrophe:

Some governments will lose their ability to
maintain public order and provide for the needs of their people, creating the
conditions for civil unrest, famine, [and] massive flows of migrants across
international borders .... Uncontrolled flows of migrants will sporadically
destabilize

regions of the world and threaten American interests
and citizens.

We are now witnessing these massive flows of
economic refugees from poverty-stricken . . . .

We show that long-term fluctuations of war
frequency and population changes followed the cycles of temperature change.
Further analyses show that cooling impeded agricultural production, which
brought about a series of serious social problems, including price inflation,
then successively war outbreak, famine, and population decline successively.
The findings suggest that worldwide and synchronistic war–peace, population,
and price cycles in recent centuries have been driven mainly by long-term
climate change. The findings also imply that social mechanisms that might
mitigate the impact of climate change were not significantly effective during
the study period. Climate change may thus have played a more important role and
imposed a wider ranging effect on human civilization than has so far been
suggested. Findings of this research may lend an additional dimension to the
classic concepts of Malthusianism and Darwinism.